Picture this scenario, if you can: Imagine a President that’s besieged by critics on all sides, from a public wondering if he has the mental capacity to lead to pundits wondering whether he’s being outfoxed by the Russians. A President elected on a promise of law and order and Making America Great Again. Sound familiar? I’m referring, of course, to Ronald Reagan, but it would be understandable for you to assume the description was for our current commander in chief, Donald Trump. And it wouldn’t be misplaced comparison; in fact, the similarities between the two can be at times uncanny and are quite visible in the documentary, The Reagan Show, recently added to Hulu, in which we get an unfiltered, unedited look at the Reagan presidency, devoid of any commentary or narration, allowing the footage speak for itself. It’s a fascinating approach, letting the audience to draw their own conclusions and among the ones I came to was just how alike the two presidents are, both in their approach to the job, and its challenges.

The Reagan Show begins with Ronald Reagan’s final interview before leaving the White House. David Brinkley asks him if he learned anything as an actor that has been useful to him as president, to which Reagan responded, “I’m tempted to say, there have been times in this office I wondered how you’d do the job without having been an actor.” It’s a perfect way to begin the documentary, and gives a keen insight into how the Reagan White House functioned. Early on, the filmmakers inform us that the Reagan Administration’s use of film and video to document his presidency was unprecedented; they generated as much footage in his eight years in office as the previous five administrations had combined. As David Gergen, White House Communications Director states, “The White House has become more and more of a stage, a theater. And the question has become are the television networks gonna manage that theater and manage that stage or is the white house gonna do that?” This is a fundamental shift in the paradigm of governing as president, from a passive approach of leaving messaging up to the news media to the updated model of taking their messaging directly to the American people and his supporters. You can’t help but instantly make the connection to today and how President Trump’s most powerful weapon on the campaign trail was Twitter, allowing him to directly speak to the people without being filtered (and fact checked) by the media.

The Reagan administration’s desire to orchestrate television coverage is further displayedby their laser focus on the manner in which they wanted the president to appear at all times — confident and in control, an extension of the persona he had adopted as an actor. In all of Ronald Reagan’s films, he played the good guy, the all American hero who always would do the right thing and save the day. This perception has a powerful effect on voters, who associated the characters Reagan played in films with the actual Reagan, and the Reagan White House ensured that in their footage and tightly managed public appearances, it would be impossible to separate the two. This is just as true in politics today, and also play a huge role in the public’s perception of Donald Trump. Roger Stone, a close Trump confidant and advisor, described in an interview how Trump had spent decades in the public eye honing an image of a successful, jet-setting businessman: first in the roaring ’80s when he dominated the New York tabloids, and then again during the run of The Apprentice. Perception became reality in the eyes of red state voters.

The Reagan Show goes on to cover one of President Reagan’s signature projects, the Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as Star Wars), an orbiting network of satellites capable of shooting down enemy nuclear warheads before they reached the US. One of the greatest concerns among a number of Americans in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War was the threat of nuclear war, and SDI was the deus ex machina offered up by Reagan to solve the problem. Panned by his critics as an impossible, overly expensive, pie in the sky idea, it nonetheless captured the imagination of Reagan’s supporters and made Reagan appear to be a proactive leader in the nuclear showdown. Today, we have The Wall, President Trump’s own expensive deus ex machina that excited his supporters and drew universal condemnation from his opponents and Mexico, who was told they were to foot the bill. While both SDI and the Wall are so easily dismissed for their lack of practicality, it is impossible not to see how they allowed Reagan and Trump to harness a signature issue to rally their base and appear to offer a solution to a difficult problem.

One of the most remarkable similarities between Presidents Reagan and Trump gleaned from The Reagan Show is the one issue that both were constantly hounded about: Russia. In Reagan’s time, the narrative was a charismatic Soviet leader had outflanked Reagan and gained an upper hand, with Gorbachev’s ability to have his messaging influence US media coverage and perception in a way to benefit him through a concerted PR campaign. You can probably easily make the connection to today with Putin using a much less diplomatic and much more sinister influence campaign online to have his message reach the US. In both instances, the media would wonder if the US president was outmatched by their counterpart in Moscow, reading the tea leaves from each meeting between the leaders closely (and then expressing doubt in the president’s abilities to negotiate). In the end of the documentary, we see Reagan sign a landmark nuclear arms reduction deal with the USSR, but it remains to be seen how today’s president will handle the challenge from the Kremlin.

The Reagan Show is a fascinating documentary, presented in a completely unbiased, non-partisan fashion, offering a unique prism with which to understand the presidency, then and now. In many ways, we see President Reagan as being the trailblazer responsible for creating the blueprint for Trump, harnessing perception and messaging in a way that earned him the title of The Great Communicator. Near the end of The Reagan Show, Peter Jennings says a line during the 1988 Republican National Convention that most clearly expresses the tie between Reagan and Trump, and foreshadows Trump’s rise, when he looks back on the Reagan years and muses, “No presidency before this one was so often judged as if it were a performing art. I shudder when it’s suggested that politicians who come after him are going to have to succeed first on television.”

Comfortably Smug is a government relations professional with a focus on the financial services industry. He can be found on Twitter with his musings on all things finance and politics at @ComfortablySmug